This weekend, TGATP was honored to attend and cover the WIE (Women: Inspiration. Enterprise.) Symposium, a two-day conference that featured seminars designed to empower women in business. It was an amazing and enlightening couple of days with panels covering such essential topics as: getting the right mindset to succeed, building a brand, the business of film, the business of beauty, and the business of tech on the first day and inspirational panels on the second. The panels were short and info packed. I especially liked the tech panel, where I learned some new things and received affirmations on a few others. In addition the Business of Beauty, the Philanthropy, and the Tech Start-up workshops were excellent. Only two panels did not live up to their potential. The first was the Business of Film panel, which was not informative enough and mostly folks patting themselves on the back for making it into the exclusive club while denying that it still is an exclusive club! And the second was the Tech Entrepreneurs panel, in which the audience was basically told that unless they were already rich they could not start a tech business! This is definitely not true. As shown in “The Social Network”, Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg was not wealthy when he launched Facebook and relied on his friend for capital. So if you are not personally wealthy, dream big and cultivate wealthy smart friends who get it!
Throughout the symposium, I met some really great women such as Tara Smith, who has a natural hair care line that I am looking forward to trying and promoting, Spirit Junkie Gabrielle Bernstein, Tia Beauchamp, and Ingrid Vandervelt, the first Dell Entrepreneur-In-Residence, who I felt an instant bond with! It was also great to catch up with Tamara Mellon of Jimmy Choo Makeup Maven Sonia Kashuk, and the always fun Kelly “Kell On Earth” Cutrone, who mentioned that she is exec producing three shows on top of running People’s Revolution, her burgeoning PR business.
On Sunday, Nancy Pelosi was the featured speaker and she wowed the mostly female audience with her words of encouragement and inspiration! Pelosi’s statement that “Nothing is more wholesome for a country than the increased participation of its women” particularly resonated with me. Day Two featured a visit by Ted Turner, the aforementioned wonderful panel on philanthropy with speakers including Susan B. Komen and Fran Drescher, a speech from Jill Biden on conditions for women in Africa, a call to action on Somalia by WIE award winner Iman, and an amazing meditation and closing statement by Deepak Chopra. Deepak led the audience in an extraordinary exercise in which we closed our eyes and summoned the many different goddesses within us, a practice that I intend to do every day now. I was deeply starstruck and honored to meet him!
I loved this event and it was wonderful to finally meet women, who actually have something going on and are supportive of each other! There was a true kinship in the air and all of the speakers made themselves available to advise the participants afterwards. The WIE Symposium was quite simply, the best conference I have ever attended! Women can and will change the world.
Check back for a gallery of pics from the whole weekend.
